SEPTEMBER 1 — My body’s stress response is predictable and often inconvenient: I fall asleep.
Perhaps it’s a failsafe to prevent my blood pressure from rising or to stabilise my emotional and mental state but I have given up trying to fight it and let myself sleep — ordinarily I’m a very light sleeper.
Thus after the recent Cabinet announcement, my immediate reaction was to take a nap.
After waking up, I could, with some impassiveness, dissect my feelings about the “new” Cabinet.
I like it even less than the old one, which says a lot.
What I do like is my new rice cooker.
My research informed me that induction heating rice cookers were the way to go — while standard rice cookers depended on just one heating element at the bottom, induction heating incorporated the entire inner pan, thus heat would radiate from all over and not just from below.
Zojirushi rice cookers with the feature were apparently the ones to beat but they’re not sold locally and I had no desire to order one all the way from Japan.
The cheapest alternative was Xiaomi’s induction heating rice cookers that came in three- and four-litre options.
One downside was that the manual and buttons were in Chinese but fortunately Xiaomi has a downloadable English manual and the app that came with it also has an English option.
Was spending RM250 or so on a rice cooker worth it, when I could get cheaper options from RM100-200?
Seeing as my rice came out exactly as I liked it, I would say yes.
What makes my rice cooker “smart” is that with the app, I can customise my rice by type, hardness and even tweak the cooking type as I like.
It even had a special brown rice setting, which is useful as getting brown rice right can be a case of trial and error though my previous attempts have always been edible, though not ideal.
Nice, but not necessary extras were special settings I could use to make soups and stews, and even yogurt.
What was delightful was that I even got a phone notification to tell me when my rice was cooked, as well as being able to check on the phone that my rice was being kept warm.
I wish my experience with the current government has been as delightful.
With deaths soaring past the 300 mark, are our leaders commiserating with our grief and fear? No.
Instead we have a former advisor claiming the government ignored said advisor’s advice, handily throwing the past administration under the bus.
My question is: if your advice, if it was worth anything in the first place, was being ignored, why stay in your post?
Why not quietly make an exit, claiming you wanted to spend more time with your family or on a personal project, instead of basking in media attention and countless photo ops?
The Malaysian way of refusing to resign to make a point or to take responsibility is deplorable.
Instead of taking responsibility for the disastrous management of the pandemic, most of the same faces remain in the same portfolios and yet we expect things to change?
I have more faith in my rice cooker to do its job.
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
